Class Clowns

Musicians who aren't afraid of being goofballs can seem second-class by birth, but Mike Powell makes a case for comedy in his latest column, asking: What if being serious was just the wall we had to break through on the way to being funny?

Lately I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the cover of a Fats Waller record called Fine Arabian Stuff. Nobody is paying me to do this, nor do I think there’s anything tangible to be gained. I’m doing it because the words Fine Arabian Stuff and the look on Fats Waller’s face make me laugh. Two letters, one syllable, wide open at the end like a bell: ha.

To define humor as a bulwark against pain and seriousness is still giving seriousness the upper hand. What if it was the other way around? What if being serious was just the wall we had to break through on the way to being funny?

When I started listening to Waller’s music earlier this year, I almost reflexively combed through his biography looking for a source of trauma—something he might have used humor to overcome. Nothing stood out, though toward the end of his life he got tired of the broad entertainment he had become famous for and wanted to work on more “serious” compositions. Being a clown had become his burden. (This is the easy narrative I needed.)

Despite its title and cover, Fine Arabian Stuff is a pretty somber album. Most of the second side is church music. Not that Waller doesn’t go in on it, twisting up “Go Down Moses” like it was some kind of joke. He couldn’t help himself—humor had become his compulsion. (I need this easy narrative too.)

Both routines were hilarious to me. Imagine how disappointed I was when I found out that they were based on songs, and that the songs weren’t funny at all.

My friend Thomas has always contended that nothing will ever be as funny as a man being hit in the genitals. I happen to disagree, but do understand where he’s coming from. As much as I like wit, there is something pure and almost mystical about humor that doesn’t rely on words: slapstick, vaudeville, animated GIFs. It seems to predate us. One thing I’d like to do with a time machine is give a whoopee cushion to a Neanderthal.

Then there’s my two-year-old nephew Luke. He and I have been playing a game called Hiding. In Hiding, I crouch behind the sofa, then pop out and make a single-syllable noise like “blahh” or “boo.” Luke cracks up, then I crack up. We become two simple machines lost in a feedback loop of dumb joy, without history, context, or reason. It is the only time I am ever sure we understand each other.

Sound doesn’t always translate perfectly into gesture, but I do think it’s worth noting the similarities between certain types of synth bass and farting. The producer Todd Terje seems to grasp this, as does DJ Koze. DJ Mustard productions are sometimes funny too, but they’re often leveraged against unfunny rappers.

In general, though, music seems to be going through a deeply unfunny phase. Drake, Kanye West, Arcade Fire, St. Vincent, the National, Eric Church—saviors, all of them, dragging their artistry around like shackles. Even clown princess and true American hero Nicki Minaj ends up rewarded for the moments in which she reminds you she has something “real” to say and will use her grown-up voice doing it. In this caste, goofballs remain second-class by birth.

When I was 16, the mother of a girl who I was pining after told me, “Powell, your problem is that you’re the hero of your own tragedy.” I don’t remember how I responded. But I do remember going home and burying myself in the Elliott Smith album Either/Or, angry that I’d been humiliated but secretly proud of my own unhappiness, like it was some kind of noble state only the chosen could attain.

Now I understand that this girl’s mom was just trying to zing me.

Not that I think it’s a good idea to zing sensitive teenagers. I only laugh because I can’t make it go away, and because the alternative seems worse. As for Either/Or, I still listen to it now and then but generally try to avoid it. Its sadness seems too convenient; too easy to slip into and too strong to resist, like a current that carries you out to sea as you float on your back.

I have spent no small amount of time in my life with the Coasters song “Charlie Brown”. (You might know it by the refrain, “Why’s everybody always pickin’ on me?”) Brown, with his lumpy head and little squiggle of hair, lives in the collective imagination as a symbol of pity and plain bad luck. His teams lose, his bubbles pop. Tiny storm clouds follow him wherever he goes. Good grief, Charlie Brown, will the tragedy of having been born never cease?

But in the Coasters song, his self-deprecation becomes a gag, a mask that lets him cause trouble with impunity. Woe is you, Charlie Brown, bitch of the universe: All this time we were giving you our sympathy and you were just loading another spitball.

Listen to the Coasters’ voices and you may awaken to the possibility that anything can be a joke if you tell it like one. Give “Charlie Brown” to Elliott “Charlie Brown” Smith, and you’d have a very different song.

The other afternoon I stopped into a bar and had a beer alone. When I asked about the soundtrack, the bartender told me they were going for “a strip-club vibe.” (The bar does not host strippers.) Juicy J’s “Bandz a Make Her Dance” came on. It is a heavy, miserable song, with a hole in the middle where someone seems to have scooped out its heart. Bored and joyless, Juicy throws his dollars at strippers with the wearied hand of a factory machinist. You say no to ratchet pussy. He can’t.

As the song’s emptiness filled the room, I realized that never before have we as a culture been subjected to so much unhappiness perpetrated in the name of luxury and status. The rich not only get richer but manage to make being rich seem less enviable all the time. (That, of course, is its own type of gag. Drake could become a goat farmer in Hawaii tomorrow and live in splendor for the rest of his life.)

I like “Bandz”, but only because I think it says something important about our time. It is the sound of the palace at night, abandoned. “It does seem like a song I should be hearing while day drinking alone,” I told the bartender. He nodded. Then, like the beams of a submersible shining into the darkness of the ocean deep, I heard a voice: “2 Chaaaaaaainz!”

The Coasters had a song about strippers too, called “Little Egypt”. If Juicy J plays a soulless regular, the Coasters are first-timers, excited but intimidated, jolted by the recurring tingle of disbelief that they are in a strip club at all. In the third verse—the place gags always wrap up—we discover that the narrator and Little Egypt, the stripper, now have seven babies, who crawl around on the floor singing the song Little Egypt sang in her heyday: “Yiiiiiiiing yang. Yiiiiiiing yang.” Of course, the babies’ voices are sped up, because babies have high voices, and everyone knows that high voices are funny.

Pain is inevitable, but whether we express our pain with more pain is our own choice. In troubling times, I look to the old country and novelty-song singer Roger Miller’s “Do Wacka Do”. The refrain goes like this: “I wish I had your happiness, and you had a do wacka do wacka do wacka do.”

You can almost hear the joke taking over as he sings, as though he realizes mid-confession that he would be better off laughing. It is the sound of him healing himself in real time.

When I was 18, I fell in love with a girl for the first time, in a way that I have never fallen in love again. We worshipped each other like gods but had a hard time doing regular things, like going to the grocery store. Our projections were impossible to maintain. It ended so badly we couldn’t stomach looking at each other.

People are always surprised when I tell them that she’s lived up the street for the past four years. It is as disorienting as you might imagine. Sometimes I see her walking her dogs in front of my living-room window; sometimes, her and my fiancé end up at the same yoga class. We are almost like apparitions to each other—hard to believe but too real to ignore.

Last week, she called, and we met for a walk. It was the most time we’d spent together in a decade. To explain how I felt about it would probably take at least as long. “I’m sorry,” I told her as we headed home. “If I don’t try and make you laugh soon, I’m going to cry.”

“Ha,” she said. “Ha ha ha ha ha.”

Earlier, she reminded me of all the music we had listened to together. I remembered it too: Tooling around our hometown at night with the windows down, holding hands, worried that words would ruin whatever the silence had in store for us. She still listens to those songs, she told me, but it feels different now than it used to. Easier.

I thought about my bedroom wall from high school, which my mom kept up through my first year of college—the year I met this girl. Among the cutouts and postcards tacked to the wall was an ad for Elliott Smith’s Either/Or, out now on Kill Rock Stars. Suddenly I felt sad, not because I was reminded of Smith’s music, but because I wondered if he had lived long enough to have the experience I was having, sitting in a city park across from someone who at some point he had caused so much pain, laughing.

Fats Waller died of pneumonia in December of 1943, while traveling by train back from tour in California. His manager found him in his sleeping compartment. Over 4,000 people attended the memorial in Harlem. Pastor and civil rights leader Adam Clayton Powell delivered the eulogy. “Because God gave him genius in skill,” he said, “he in turn gave the world laughter and joy for its difficult and lonely hours.”

The body was cremated, and the story is that a black ace pilot scattered his ashes over Harlem, though it probably isn’t true: Only one black ace pilot has ever existed, and in December, 1943, he was probably training in Europe. Whatever happened, I like the idea that Waller was light, not in the ground but fluttering somewhere over it.